- Damaged heat spreader: I tried vice method with no luck. The edge just curled up on itself like a wave, so I filed it down. (Sorry, no before-filing pics).

- Gouged the PCB: as I was cutting the IHS off, I knick a corner with my blade. I only notice after it's carved a little bit of green out. I swap blades and get the job done.

- Won't POST: After a quick cleanup and re-tim with Ceramique, I pop it in. It won't post. Boot loop power off. I thought I killed a chip, but I remembered... I had painters tape on the bottom as a 'leash' for the vice method. Decided to clean off the residue from the bottom of the chip.

- It's ALIVE!!!: It's alive, but instead of Linpack @ 100C, it is now a nice and icy 95C. WTF??

- Concave IHS: It's concave as hell.

- Should have noticed before I started it all, because this was with the stock CPU:

Zoob, I want to suggest that you lap the IHS, but in reality that did not do very much for me. I just got the naked mounting kit for my Supremacy installed and my max temp went from about 90c to mid-70s. (I gained around 10c during summer, if you are wondering why I said 80c previously in the thread)

Is the mounting hardware of your waterblock capable of going tighter after IHS and retention bracket thingy removal, or do those screws bottom out too soon?

Thanks for the input. I've put a line of thermal paste down the middle and that was the imprint it left.
I'm fine with my block being convex to push all the paste out from the middle (where the core is).

It's most likely just a combination of bad chip and overzealous voltages coming from my ASUS Z87 Deluxe.
I manually set it to 40x100 1.175V and I get around 80-82C LinX full load. 42x100 1.25V hits 86C and is not stable.

Does anybody in GTA east have a bench setup for naked mounting and would be willing to help test my chip? :|